THE
BILL'S BACK IN TIME COLUMN PAGECopies of my column in Mark Thomas' "Racin'
Paper"

Column #31 from Column 44

BILL’S BACK IN TIME

By Bill Ladabouche

AN AMAZING
COMBINATION OF RACE LEGEND, EDUCATOR, AND POLITICO

In the
years between 1954, when Pico Raceway closed its doors, and 1962, when C.J.
Richards opened Fairmont Speedway on a semi – permanent basis, the chances for
me and my uncle to see any stock races were few and far between . We had driven
all the way to Malletts Bay in 1958; we had digressed from a trip to New York
City to see relatives and had gone to Weisglass Stadium on Staten Island; I had
witnessed the Lebanon Valley presentation at the Rutland fairgrounds in 1960;
and we had seen a few races in the cow pasture at Otter Creek Speedway in 1961.

To try
and help me satisfy my urge to have some connection to racing in the interim, my
uncle had graciously joined NASCAR, primarily so we could get the NASCAR
Newsletter that came out a few time a year. I wish I had kept all those race
entry forms for the Grand National races of that era- they’d be worth something
today ! I can clearly recall one newsletter that came in the mail around 1960.
On the cover was a photo of Airborne Speedway driver Melvin “Bob” Bruno, with
one hand out the window of his #66 coupe keeping a calming hand on his
over-excited eldest son, Chris.

Bob Bruno leads future national champion Bill Wimble in the car that was
shown on the cover of the NASCAR Newsletter. [Courtesy of John Rock]

I never
forgot that picture, and I managed to see Chris Bruno last Saturday night at
Airborne, when his dad was honored. The week before, I had been lucky enough to
spend quite a long time in the VIP tower at Airborne talking to Bob, resulting
in over six pages of notes. Bob was, and still is, a little different than most
of the drivers of his era. Articulate and college educated, Bob had been a prime
prospect in baseball, actually managing to play in Vermont’s Green Mountain
League- a league which featured future major league stars like Whitey Ford.

Signing
with the Phillies, Bruno played in the entry – level minor leagues in
Carbondale, Illinois and in Terre Haute, Indiana. Then the Korean War came
along, and he ended up in the service. After 1954, he decided not to try and
revive his major league dreams. He got married and took a job. After having
thought about going into law practice, Bob finally decided upon taking a
teaching position – in a school associated with the huge Plattsburgh Air Force
Base, a branch of the Strategic Air Command. He had briefly lived in Rochester,
New York and had tried his first racing at Spencer Speedway, nearby.

When
Bruno ended up back in the Plattsburgh area, the natural inclination was to seek
out racing at he local Airborne Speedway and also at nearby Saranac Speedway. At
various times, he had driven a #000 flathead Hudson hobby class car at Airborne
and was even allowed to run the car in the top division at Saranac Lake
[because, as he points out, the more powerful sportsman cars would just spin
their tires all the time]. He also drove the MB2, owned by George Bridges and a
man named McGee. He raced some with his car, a #11 at Airborne in between gigs
with other cars. Most, if not all, of his early racing was on dirt.

Bruno, in an early ride – the flathead Hudson 000 runs on
the dirt at Airborne. [Courtesy of John Rock]

The one
Bob Bruno got from all this driving was GOOD ! He finally attracted the
attention of a crackerjack car and engine builder named Vic Wolfe, a self-made
man who had come into the Plattsburgh area and who was amassing a considerable
empire of property and businesses. By this time, Bob was winning features in New
York and even at Malletts Bay, Vermont’s Colchester-Bayview Speedway. The Wolfe
opportunity was a fat one, but Wolfe’s car at the time was a Pontiac and Bruno
was adamant about driving a Chevy. Wolfe, at the time, was using Bud Besaw as
the driver and the car didn’t finish on any consistent basis.

Bob with his own #11, an early Airborne ride. [Courtesy of Gary Nephew]

Vic
Wolfe, along with his crew of Jack Rugar and Wesley Mitcher, had decided big
changes were in order; so, out went Besaw and the Pontiac. Wolfe and Rugar were
considered experts at welding and engine building, and Mitcher was – according
to Bruno – an astonishingly strong man who was willing to do whatever had to be
done to aid the team effort. Mitcher and another man once had hand-carried an
engine across the pits. Soon, there was a white 1937 Chevy coupe with big, red
numerals #66. The success was immediate and the schedules of many race teams in
those days was grueling: Fury Speedway in Canada on most Tuesday and Thursday
nights; Saranac Lake on Friday nights; Airborne on Saturday night; St. Jerome in
Canada on Sunday afternoon, and Riverside Speedway near Montreal on Sunday
nights. Then was that stuff called work, sleep, and the family.

One year,
in their race efforts, Bob, Vic, and the team won 30 out of the 45 races they
attempted. Vic Wolfe owned one third of Airborne, but the track still had a
bounty on Bruno’s head one year. An extra $100 if someone could beat Bruno.
Purses then were only $300, and – with another bonus – another guy come walk
away with $450 in one feature, while Bob would earn only $300. Every year, at
the end of the season, Wolfe would sell the car [or at least one of the cars] to
someone in the region. One became Frank Hodge’s Canadian coupe, keeping the same
color and number scheme; another became the familiar Harold Healey #70 driven by
Ernie Ried, of Massena, NY.

The Harold Healey 70 was a former Vic Wolfe car that had a successful
second run [Courtesy of John Rock]

Bruno was
not just dominating Airborne. He traveled over to the new track in the cow
pasture at Waltham, Vermont – Otter Creek Speedway, a NASCAR affiliate – and won
the first feature ever there. He continued to run Saranac Lake, as well as
tracks in Canada. He and Wolfe tried several visits to the legendary Fonda oval
and did quite well there. The first year that Fonda ran separate points for
Modifieds and Sportsman cars, while running them together in the same races,
Bruno finished third in the points. Fonda bigwig Ken Shoemaker did not like
Bruno, who sometimes drive the Allie Swears #51 coupe down there. The Shoe
rammed him after one feature after Bob had made a last-minute pass to take away
a top five position.

It wasn’t
often easy. Once, in 1961 at a particularly late race in November, Bob remembers
competing against the biggest names in NASCAR that year, including Nephew and
Wimble who were locked in the famous national points battled that ended in a
dead tie for the 1961 NASCAR National Sportsman Championship. It was so cold
that day, the team was experimenting with covering portions of the radiator
grill with cardboard to get the heat up [much like you see them do with
International brand school buses in the winter]. When the short – lived but
infamous Victoria Speedway was featuring Fonda and Lebanon Valley drivers in the
early 1960’s, Bruno ran there under the assumed name of Bud Smith. It didn’t
matter, he was caught and stripped of points anyway.

Bob won
qualifiers for the big Trenton race more than once, but he didn’t really like
running the big Trenton track. The first time he ran Trenton, he had been at
Fonda the night before. He donned his light plastic dirt goggles and headed out,
onto the Trenton mile, to practice. The high speeds sucked the goggles right off
his head. Once his equipment was adapted to the speed, Bruno proceeded to lead
the big race around lap 130,when the engine decided to die. He also had no love
for the Syracuse track. In one race he lost a drive shaft, slowed, was rammed in
the rear, and had his car tank rupture - burning the car pretty much to the
ground.

Bob, by
now, was a school principal and a supervisor for the town of Schuyler Falls. In
New York, a supervisor is a pretty important political job, and the board hated
to let him off to go racing. So, when the modern new track, Catamount Stadium,
opened in 1965 across Lake Champlain in Milton, Vermont, Bob was late every week
because the supervisors met early that very same evening. He would try to help
competitors get a leg up whenever he could. One neighbor [who shall remain
nameless] was having a tough time competing at Malletts Bay, because he could
never get the running restarts down pat. Over and over, Bob pointed out that the
cars always sped up on the backstretch and that the driver should pick his mark
at which to speed up. It turns out the guy had terrible depth perception and had
no idea, not only how close the “mark” he had picked was, but also he could not
judge how deep to enter the turns. Some things are just not meant to be. It
would turn some peoples’ blood cold to know this guy went into the era of really
powerful, high-speed, modified coupes with those eyes.

A long
racing career has its share of hairy moments. Bob and Vic had gone down to
Southern New England and had come home with the new, state-of-the-art 15 inch
steamroller tires for the #66. Bob was using the tires at Airborne to lap a
backmarker when the guys misjudged and clipped Bruno, flipping the #66 into a
retaining wall and blowing all four new tires at $125 each. Another time, Bob
had tried racing while sick with the flu. He wanted to get up front fast and be
able to coast on home. He said that Dick Nephew was always his toughest
competitor to pass because Nephew ran a diamond pattern even on dirt. On the
outside of Nephew, Bruno saw someone else spin out and head into the oncoming
field. He hit the guy head on, bending the frame. The steering wheel hit Bob in
the face. Bob was one the first to wear a chest strap with his seat belt. That
probably saved his life that day.

Another
time at Airborne, Bob was participating in practice, when he left the track, and
went up, through the tin fence that separated the racing area from the parking
lot. He said he could see the roofs of the parked cars way down below and
thought to himself “This is gonna hurt”. It did, but he missed all the cars. The
accelerator had stuck and he had gone over a sand barrier that had acted like a
launching ramp. At Saranac Lake, he wasn’t so lucky. He went through another
metal fence, having slid across damp evening grass. This time, he nailed a
number of cars in the parking lot, including a recently – restored Willys coupe.
The owner ended up to never forgive Bruno. To make matters worse, the guy
eventually became a political rival of Bruno’s.

The #66 is buried in the back of a typical Airborne heat from the early
1960’s. I recognize Gahan, Cabana,
Charland, Wimble, Bob, Ernie Reid, and Corey. [Courtesy of John Rock]

Bob
remembers little things about the glory years – particularly in the 1960’s. He
recalls the big points race and how Wimble ran every race that summer at Saranac
Lake with borrowed cars because his owner, Dave McCready, was apparently
unwilling to trot the #33 all the way up North to Saranac Lake. He also
maintains that the best dirt surface he ever ran on was Fort Covington, a
Northern New York track whose third turn was almost in Canada. The track sat by
a river that acted as part of the border; and the clay from that river was
superb. Bruno recalls they did so little to the track that it would grass
growing on it during the week between race programs, but it was always a great
surface.

There are
also the sad stories like following Dick Nephew’s car and team home from Saranac
Lake. Nephew would either drive the #6 or sometimes it was driven by local
driver Bernie Kentile. A crewman named Reyell and another man were in the Nephew
truck when it left the road. The car and trailer came forward and crushed the
cab of the pickup, killing Reyell and seriously injuring the other man. Bob and
Vic had the misfortune of being right behind the truck when the wreck occurred.
He remembers the great Jean-Paul Cabana losing part of his nose in a crash at St
Jerome Speedway, a track where they featured pari-mutuel betting – just like
horse races.

One of
the last cars Bruno had with Wolfe was a more modern, 1973 Pinto pavement mod
with a powerful 700 horsepower engine. That has been restored today and was
shown to Bob this past August at Bob Bruno Night at Airborne. When Wolfe left
town and moved down South, Bruno got a call from Canada to run a late model
sportsman in the Northern NASCAR circuit that ran out of Catamount Stadium in
Vermont. The Roger Chadore #32 had been vacated by Beaver Dragon not long
before, and was an ill-performing beast. Bruno, being so familiar with Airborne,
was able to win a feature with the Nova. Money was no object to Chadore in
racing, and the celebration at Al’s Patchwork Pub near the track was no less
liberal. Bob seems very glad to have made Chadore’s year with that one success
in an otherwise dreadful year.

Towards
the very end, Wolfe had built a Chevy Nova to race against the Northern NASCAR
late models. When the driveshaft fell out in the first week’s racing, many
people thought Wolfe and Bruno might have been over the hill, unable to deal
with the likes of Johnny Rosati, Ron Barcomb, the Dragon Brothers, and Cabana.
But the team then proceeded to win the next six Airborne features in a row. In
the final race of that streak, Danny Bridges and Charley Trombley had beaten
Bob. But, in protesting each other, they both got disqualified and handed it to
the third place Bruno. Bob once won a race at the legendary Thunder Road
backwards – because Dick Nephew and someone else had tangled on the last turn,
spinning the trailing Bruno but sending him across the strip ahead of them.

Dick Nephew and Allie Swears during practice for the sportsman race in
1960
in the car intended for Bruno [Nephew Family Photo]

Many of
us are familiar with the photos of Dick Nephew, in the Allie Swears #51 ’55
Chevy sportsman at Daytona Beach around 1960. Bruno points out [and few realize]
that he, the Airborne Champion, the guaranteed a starting spot and appearance
money in the Daytona sportsman race in February, so Swears built them a car.
Then Bruno’s school board would not let him go to Daytona during the school
year, and the car had to be given to Nephew. Swears was a little on the
unorthodox side, and he once built a coupe for Bruno to dive in Canada with the
brake and clutch pedals reversed [for some forgotten reason]. Bruno managed to
do all right until he hit the wrong pedal and flew out of the place entirely.
That was the only Swears car to be demolished until Dutch Reed put Allie’s old
faithful ’37 Chevy coupe to rest at Fairmont in 1961.

Not just
racing – but life – has been good to Bob Bruno. He has an impressive family and
devoted grandchildren. He has a satisfying career in education, as well as in
New York politics. He is an absolute legend at Airborne and didn’t do too
shabbily anywhere else, either. Bob is a young-looking man who seems very
healthy [unlike many of those he ran against in that era].The man to whom
checker flags and unruly students were sent in equal numbers, appears to be very
happy with how it has all turned out. Who came blame him ?